Book 5
470
And again, we will not take weapons to the temples for dedicatoryFor the practice cf. Aeschylus Septem 275-279 and Agamemnon 577-579. Italian cities and American states have restored to one another the flags so dedicated from old wars. Cf. Cicero De inventione ii. 70 at tamen aeternum inimicitiarum monumentum Graios de Graiis statuere non oportet. offerings, especially the weapons of Greeks, if we are at all concerned to preserve friendly relations with the other Greeks. Rather we shall fear that there is pollution in bringing such offerings to the temples from our kind unless in a case where the god bids otherwiseFor similar caution cf. on 427 B-C.. Most rightly, he said. And in the matter of devastating the land of Greeks and burning their houses, how will your soldiers deal with their enemies. I would gladly hear your opinion of that. In my view, said I, they ought to do neither, but confine themselves to taking away the annual harvest. Shall I tell you why? Do. In my opinion, just as we have the two terms, war and faction, so there are also two things, distinguished by two differentiae.I have so translated in order to imply that the Plato of the Republic is already acquainted with the terminology of the Sophist. Cf. Unity of Plato’s Thought, notes 375 and 377, followed by Wilamowitz, Platon, i. p. 504. But most editors take διαφορά here as dissension, and construe applied to the disagreements of two things, which may be right. Cf. Sophist 228 A στάσιν . . . τὴν τοῦ φύσει συγγενοῦς ἔκ τινος διαφθορᾶς διαφοράν. The two things I mean are the friendly and kindred on the one hand and the alien and foreign on the other. Now the term employed for the hostility of the friendly is faction, and for that of the alien is war. What you say is in nothing beside the mark, he replied. Consider, then, if this goes to the mark. I affirm that the Hellenic race is friendly to itself and akin, and foreign and alien to the barbarian. Rightly, he said. We shall then say that Greeks fight and wage war with barbarians, and barbarians with Greeks, and are enemies by nature,Plato shared the natural feeling of Isocrates, Demosthenes, and all patriotic Greeks. Cf. Isocrates Panegyricus 157, 184, Panath. 163; Menexenus 237 ff., Laws 692 C and 693 A. It is uncritical then with Newman (op. cit. p. 430) and many others to take as a recantation of this passage the purely logical observation in Politicus 262 D that Greek and barbarinan is an unscientific dichotomy of mankind. Cf. on the whole question the dissertation of Friedrich Weber, Platons Stellung zu den Barbaren. and that war is the fit name for this enmity and hatred. Greeks, however, we shall say, are still by nature the friends of Greeks when they act in this way, but that Greece is sick in that case and divided by faction, and faction is the name we must give to that enmity. I will allow you that habit of speech, he said. Then observe, said I, that when anything of this sort occurs in faction, as the word is now used, and a state is divided against itself, if either party devastates the land and burns the houses of the other such factional strife is thought to be an accursed thing and neither party to be true patriots. Otherwise, they would never have endured thus to outrage their nurse and mother.Cf. 414 E, Menexenus 237 E, Timaeus 40 B, Laws 740 A, Aeschylus Septem 16. But the moderate and reasonable thing is thought to be that the victors shall take away the crops of the vanquished, but that their temper shall be that of men who expect to be reconciled and not always to wage war. That way of feeling, he said, is far less savage than the other. Well, then, said I, is not the city that you are founding to be a Greek city? It must be, he said. Will they then not be good and gentle? Indeed they will. And won’t they be philhellenes,Cf. Epistles 354 A, Herodotus ii. 178, Isocrates Phil. 122, Panegyricus 96, Evagoras 40, Panath. 241. The word is still significant for international politics, and must be retained in the translation. lovers of Greeks, and will they not regard all Greece as their own and not renounce their part in the holy places common to all Greeks ? Most certainly.
